Room booking and management solutions have become essential in both educational and corporate environments.
Sean Carroll explores how room booking and management solutions are evolving within the corporate and education markets. The author recalls his university days, when finding a free space to study or complete a group assignment could become a real ordeal. In many cases, it meant walking through corridors and checking rooms one by one until an available space was finally found.
The best place to study was the library. The problem was the awkward routine of walking past every booth or room, discreetly peeking inside, making uncomfortable eye contact with whoever was using it, and then continuing on. You could walk around the entire library before finding a free room. A frustrating situation when all you needed was a place to work and finish a project before the deadline.
Room booking and scheduling solutions have become commonplace in universities, schools, and businesses. While they offer many advantages, one of the most significant is eliminating the awkward “eye-contact tango” many people experienced for years.
Many of these solutions consist of flat-panel touchscreens installed outside meeting rooms, capable of displaying who has booked the room, when, and for what purpose, while also allowing users to make reservations directly.
Distributed by Jands in Australia and New Zealand, Concierge Displays is a Melbourne-based Australian manufacturer of room booking solutions. Its flagship product is the Concierge Room Booking Panel, a customisable touchscreen installed outside meeting rooms that integrates with major calendar platforms.
Cristian Fuentes, applications engineer at Jands, explains that the manufacturer differentiates itself through its wide range of software integrations:
We don’t just connect with Microsoft and Google calendars; we also integrate with timetabling software such as Syllabus Plus, Celcat, and Time Edit. Concierge Displays isn’t trying to be the biggest company, but rather the most reliable, flexible, and integrator-friendly solution in the room booking market. We work with our partners and clients to adapt to changing needs without overcomplicating the user experience.
The Concierge Displays portfolio includes 10” to 15” panels and a 10” NFC/RFID booking display (ACMG1000). These products display room events, upcoming bookings, and feature backlighting to make them easy to use.
Logitech is another manufacturer active in this segment with its room booking solutions. Joe Touma, category manager for video collaboration ANZ at Logitech, says the company has been in this market for just over three years and is seeing strong results.
We offer a combination of hardware and software solutions. It starts with our 10” Tap Scheduler, installed outside meeting rooms or classrooms. It’s an Android-based device running CollabOS natively and works with Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Spaces, and four other compatible platforms. From an installation perspective, we designed it to be as simple as possible. It runs on PoE, not PoE+, and everything is included in the box, including the mounts. For integrators, it’s a single SKU regardless of the installation type, he explains.
Biamp also offers its Biamp Evoko ecosystem of hardware and software for room and desk booking, designed to transform how organisations manage their workspaces. “With our solutions, users can minimise double bookings and meeting interruptions by managing the flow of people more effectively across facilities, from small offices to large corporate headquarters, saving time and improving productivity”, explains Daniel Salmonsson, senior product manager for scheduling solutions at Biamp.
The company also offers Workplace Software, a cloud-based solution providing administrators with analytics and management tools. Through a centralised dashboard, users can monitor room usage, identify patterns, detect underused spaces, track no-show rates, and generate detailed reports to optimise future planning decisions. “This data-driven approach enables organisations to optimise their real estate investments by understanding how meeting spaces are actually being used compared to how they were intended to be used”, says Daniel. “At the same time, users can find the right space using customisable filters such as room size or AV equipment, another way businesses can optimise space usage”.
Joe Touma adds that Logitech offers a similar feature and uses the term ghost meetings to describe rooms that are booked but never used. “Part of our software includes auto-book and auto-release functions. Basically, if you walk into a room equipped with a Logitech Rally Bar or Rally Bar Mini, built-in occupancy sensors detect whether someone is actually using the space”, he explains. “The software recognises that someone has entered the room and understands that the meeting has started. Conversely, if nobody shows up or if the meeting ends early, the room is released and becomes available for booking again”.
Joe notes that one corporate client recently moved into a new office and reduced the number of meeting rooms from 45 to 20 while maintaining the same level of efficiency thanks to this software.
Concierge Displays offers a similar approach through its Companion software, providing cloud-based support, reporting, and analytics for both end users and integrators. Companion is offered free of charge for the first 12 months. Cristian Fuentes highlights customisation and local support as two of Concierge Displays’ key differentiators:
With our software platform, users and integrators can monitor the status of all devices, configure consistency checks, and host custom graphics, among other features.
For users wanting to manage bookings from a single location, the company introduced a 4K Summary Player, enabling all booking information to be viewed in a control-room-style environment. Users can access company-wide calendar information and room usage analytics.
Logitech’s booking solutions are also integrated into Logitech Sync, alongside the rest of the company’s ecosystem, including meeting room systems, webcams, headsets, and docks.
For all these manufacturers, one of the key developments is cloud management. While booking solutions solve the “prehistoric” problem of walking around the library searching for a free space, today’s systems are highly automated.
An employee can schedule a meeting with a client, select a room — or even be automatically assigned one — and walk in at the scheduled time without worrying about finding available space. Meanwhile, administrators can analyse how those spaces are being used, identify inefficiencies, and address them.
For integrators working in corporate and educational environments, room booking solutions have become a standard part of many installations. The challenge now lies in choosing the option that best fits the needs of each space and user.
